INTRODUCTION

THE Timaeus belongs to the latest group of Plato's works: SOPhistand Statesman, Timaeus and Critias, Philebus, Laws. The wholegroup must fall within the last twenty years of his life, whichended in 347 B.C. at the age of eighty or eighty-one. The Lawsis the only dialogue that is certainly later than the Timaeus andCritics. It is probable, then, that Plato was nearer seventy thansixty when he projected the trilogy, Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates-the most ambitious design he had ever conceived. Too ambitious,it would seem; for he abandoned it when he was less than half­way through. The Critias breaks off in an unfinished sentence;the Hermocrates was never written. Only the Timaeus is complete;but its introductory part affords some ground for a conjecturalreconstruction of the whole plan.

The conversation in this dialogue and its sequel is supposed totake place .at Athens on the day of the Panathenaea. We are toimagine that, -on the previous day, Socrates has been discoursingto Critias, his two guests from Italy and Sicily, Timaeus of Locriand Hermocratesof Syracuse, and a fourth unnamed person whois to-day absent through indisposition. The Panathenaic festivalwould provide an obvious occasion for the strangers' presence inAthens, as it does for the visit of Parmenides and Zeno in anotherof the late dialogues.!

The Athenian Critias is an old man, who finds it easier to remem­ber the long-distant past than what happened yesterday, andspeaks of his boyhood as 'very long ago', when the poems ofSolon could be described as a novelty. He cannot, therefore, bethe Critias who was Plato's mother's cousin and one of theThirty Tyrants. He must be the grandfather of that Critiasand Plato's great-grandfather.s He tells us that he was eighty

1 Parm. 127D. The comparison is made by Pro i, 84. That' the festivalof the goddess' (Athena) mentioned at 2IA and 26E is the Panathenaea isclear from the context in both places and would never have been doubtedbut for the unfounded notion that Socrates is supposed to have narratedon the previous day the whole of the Republic, or a substantial part of it,as it stands in our texts. This will be considered below.

2 See Burnet, Gk. Phil. i, 338, and Appendix. Tr., p. 23. Diehl, P.-W.,Real-Encycl., s.v. Kritias.

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INTRODUCTION

years younger than his own grandfather, the Critias who wasSolon's friend.

Hermocrates, according to Produs (on 20A) and modern scholars,is the Syracusan who defeated the Athenian expedition to Sicily inPlato's childhood (415-413 B.C.). Thucydides (vi, 72 ) describeshim as a man of outstanding intelligence, conspicuous bravery, andgreat military experience. At his first appearance in the History(iv, 58) he delivers a wise speech at a conference of Sicilian states,advising them to make peace among themselves and warning themof the danger of Athenian aggression. Evidently at that date(424 B.C.) he was already a prominent figure in Sicilian politics.After the defeat of the Athenian expedition he was banished by thedemocratic party. He lost his life in an attempt to reinstate him­self by force, probably in 407 B.C. In the present gathering ofphilosophers and statesmen he is pre-eminently the man of action.Since the dialogue that was to bear his name was never written,we can only guess why Plato chose him. It is curious to reflectthat, while Critias is to recount how the prehistoric Athens of ninethousand years ago had repelled the invasion from Atlantis andsaved the Mediterranean peoples from slavery, Hermocrates would beremembered by the Athenians as the man who had repulsed theirown greatest effort at imperialist expansion. He had also attemptedto reform from within his native city, Syracuse, the scene of Plato'sown abortive essays towards the reconstruction of existing society.

There is no evidence for the historic existence of Timaeus ofLocri. If he did exist, we know nothing whatever about himbeyond Socrates' description of him as a man well-born and rich,who had held the highest offices at Locri and become eminent inphilosophy (20A), and Critias' remark that Timaeus was the bestastronomer in the party and had made a special study of the natureof the universe. This is consistent with his being a man in middlelife, contemporary with Hermocrates.! The very fact that a man

1 I cannot follow Tr.'s inference from Socrates' words that' we cannotimagine him (Timaeus) to be less than seventy and he may be decidedlyolder' (p. 17). Sir Arthur Eddington and Professor Dirac were both electedinto chairs of mathematics at Cambridge in or' about their thirtieth years.In the fifth century B.C. a man of that age might easily have read everythingwritten in Greek on physics and mathematics. Nor did the Greeks wait tilla man was nearing seventy before electing him to the highest offices. Tr.also says (p. 49) that' the youth of Hermocrates explains why he remainssilent throughout the dialogue. Proclus saw that his silence is significant,but did not interpret it correctly.' But Hermocrates does make a notunimportant contribution to the conversation on the only occasion offeredhim (20C), a fact on which Pro comments. He also speaks in the introductoryconversation of the Critias (IOSB) in terms which, with other passages, makeit clear that he was to take the leading part in the third dialogue of the trilogy.

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INTRODUCTION

of such distinction has left not the faintest trace in political orphilosophic history is against his daim to be a real person. Theprobability is that Plato invented him because he required a philo­sopher of the Western school, eminent both in science and states­manship, and there was no one to fill the part at the imaginarytime of the dialogue. Archytas was of the type required.' a brilliantmathematician and seven times strategus at Tarentum; but helived too late: Plato first met him about 388 B.C. In the firstcentury A.D. a treatise On the Soul of the World and Nature wasforged in the name of Timaeus of Locri. I t was taken by theNeoplatonists for a genuine document, whereas it is now seen tobe a mere summary of the Timaeus. In our dialogue, as Wilamo­witz observes (Platon i, 591), Timaeus speaks dogmatically, butwithout any appeal to authority, and we may regard his doctrinesimply as Plato's own. So in the Sophist Plato speaks throughthe mouth of an Eleatic, who is yet not a champion of Parmenides'system, but holds a theory of Forms unquestionably Platonic.Plato nowhere says that Timaeus is a Pythagorean. He some­times follows Empedodes, sometimes Parmenides; indeed heborrows something from every pre-Socratic philosopher of import­ance, not to mention Plato's contemporaries. Much of the doctrineis no doubt Pythagorean; and this gave the satirist Timon a handlefor his spiteful accusation of plagiarism against Plato. When thetreatise ascribed to Timaeus had been forged, it was assumed thatthis was the book from which Plato had copied (Pr. i, I and 7)·2As a consequence, all the doctrines which the forger had found inthe Timaeus itself were supposed to be of Pythagorean origin. Thetestimony of later commentators is vitiated by this false assumption.

There is no ground for any conjecture as to the identity of thefourth person, who is absent. The only sensible remark recordedby Produs is the observation of Atticus that he is presumablyanother visitor from Italy or Sicily, since Socrates asks Timaeusfor news of him (Pr. i, 20). Plato may have wished to keep openthe possibility of extending his trilogy to a fourth dialogue andheld this unnamed persoll in reserve. 3 Socrates proposes that thethree who are present (not Timaeus alone) shall undertake thewhole task which the four were to have shared. He first recapitu­lates his own discourse of the previous day. Socrates, we are told,had been describing the institutions of a city on the lines of theRepublic. He had ended by expressing his wish to see this citytransferred from the plane of theory to temporal fact. He now

1 As Frank observes, Plato und d. sag. Pythagoreer, 129·

2 For the history of this document, see Tr., p. 39·3 So Ritter, N. Unt., 181.

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INTRODUCTION

gives a summary of his own discourse, in response to Timaeus'request to be reminded of the task to be performed by himself andhis friends. Later (zoe) it appears that such a reminder was reallyunnecessary, since the three have talked over the task required ofthem and have come prepared with a plan for its fulfilment. Thesummary is, in fact, entirely for the sake of informing the readerof Plato's design to identify the citizens of the ideal state with theprehistoric Athenians of Critias' romance.

From ancient times to the present day many false inferencesand theories have been founded on the situation imagined by Plato,in spite of his own clear indication conveyed in the statement thatthe summary actually given is complete: nothing of importancehas been omitted (19A, B). Plato could not have stated more plainlythat Socrates is not to be supposed to have narrated the wholeconversation in the Republic as we have it. It follows at oncethat he did not intend the Republic to stand as the first dialoguein his new series.! If he had, no recapitulation would have beenneeded; the stage should have been set in an introduction to theRepublic itself. But some scholars have seen evidence here for anoriginal edition of the Republic, containing only the parts sum­marised. Such speculations are baseless. The summary is con­fined to the external institutions of the state outlined in Republic ii,36g-v, 471. It is impossible to imagine an edition of the dialogueomitting the whole of the analogy between the structure of thesoul and that of the state, the analysis of the individual soul intothree parts, and the discussion of the virtues of the individual andof the state; nor could the omission of these topics in the summarybe called a matter of no importance. The simple and naturalconclusion was drawn long ago by Hirzel.s No doubt Plato wasthinking of the contents of that part of the Republic and intendinghis readers to recall them; but he was not the slave of his ownfictions. There was nothing to prevent him from imaginingSocrates describing his ideal state on more than one occasion.He tells us here that Socrates has outlined its institutions, andnothing more, on the previous day. That day, moreover, was notthe day after the feast of Bendis (Thargelion 19 or 20), when theconversation with Glaucon and Adeimantus at the house of Cephalustook place, though nothing would have been easier than to mentionthat date if Plato had meant to identify Socrates' discourse with

1 As Pr., for example, imagined (i, 8). In consequence, he and othercritics were puzzled how to explain why the Republic was to precede theTimaeus, and not follow it, as it obviously should (i, 200 ff.],

I De,. Dialog. (1895), i, 257. So Ritter, N. Unto 177, and Friedlander,Plat. Scbr. 600. Cf. also Rivaud, Timee, p. 19.

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INTRODUCTION

the narration of the Republic. The present occasion is < the festivalof Athena',1 and one to which the projected discourse of Critias isappropriate. As Proclus remarks(i, 172), the Panathenaic dis­courses regularly celebrated the Athenian victories by land andsea in the Persian Wars, while Critias celebrates Athens by recount­ing her victory over the invaders from Atlantis. Proclus himselfhad. no doubt that the Lesser Panathenaea was meant; . he knewno more than that this festival < came after' the Bendidea andthought it took place < about the same time' (i, 84-5), whereas heknew that the Greater Panathenaea fell in Hecatombaeon (i, 26).Neither festival, in fact, came within two months of the Bendidea.Plato probably intended the Greater Panathenaea. There is noother indication of the dramatic date; and it is unlikely thatPlato had troubled himself about the question whether there wasany such occasion on which Hermocrates could have visited Athens.The date is of no importance. In his earliest dialogues Plato wasconcerned to give the Athenians a true impression of Socrates'character and activity, and he was at great pains to recreate theatmosphere of the times. That interest was long past. In thelatest group there was no motive to keep up the illusion that theconversations had really taken place. From all this it follows thatthe dramatic date and setting of the Republic have no bearingwhatever on the dramatic date of the Timaeus trilogy. Also noground remains for any inference that Plato meant the contents ofthe later books of the Republic to' be superseded or corrected by theTimaeus.

The design of the present trilogy is thus completely independentof the Republic. What was that design? The political questionanswered in the Republic had been: What is the least change inexisting society necessary to cure the evils afflicting mankind?Plato had imagined a reformed Greek city-state with institutionsbased, as he claimed, on the unalterable characteristics of humannature. It appeared to be just within the bounds of possiblerealisation. Referring to hopes founded on Dion or on the youngerDionysius, he had said that his state might see the light of day,if some prince could be found endowed with the philosophic nature,and if that nature could escape corruption. But towards the endof the Republic Plato seems less hopeful, and the state recedes asa pattern laid up in heaven, by which the merits and defects of allexisting constitutions might be measured and appraised. More­over, since that dialogue was written, Plato's Sicilian adventures

1 21A, £V TV 7TaV'TJ'Ytlpn (the word implies an important festival); 26E, orfi7TapoVCTf/ rij~ 8£ov 8vala. There was no such festival on Thargelion 21. ThePlynteria came five days later.

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INTRODUCTION

had ended in disappointment. Accordingly, the discourse re­capitulated at the opening of the Timaeus covers only the outlineof the state given in the earlier books of the Republic, ignoring allthe later books, which had started from the question how it mightbe realised in the future and sketched its possible decline throughlower forms of polity. The new trilogy is to transfer this state tothe plane of actual existence, not in the future, but in the remotepast, as the Athens of nine thousand years ago. This is the subjectof the Critias, introduced at once as the central theme of the whole.

By way of preface, Timaeus is to recount his myth of creation,ending with the birth of mankind. The whole movement startsfrom the ideal world of the Demiurge and the eternal Forms,descending thence to the frame of the visible universe and thenature of man, whose further fortunes Critias will 'take over'for his story. Looking deeper, we see that the chief purpose ofthe cosmological introduction is to link the morality externalisedin the ideal society to the whole organisation of the world.! TheRepublic had dwelt on the structural analogy between the stateand the individual soul. Now Plato intends to base his conceptionof human life, both for the individual and for society, on the inex­pugnable foundation of the order of the universe. The parallelof macrocosm and microcosm runs through the whole discourse.True morality is not a product of human evolution, still less thearbitrary enactment of human wills. I t is an order and harmonyof the soul; and the soul itself is a counterpart, in miniature, ofthe soul of the world, which has an everlasting order and harmonyof its own, instituted by reason. This order was revealed to everysoul before its birth (4IE); and it is revealed now in the visiblearchitecture of the heavens. That human morality is so based onthe cosmic order had been implied, here or there, in earlier works;but the Timaeus will add something more like a demonstration,although in mythical form.

In the next dialogue Critias will repeat the legend learnt by Solonfrom an Egyptian priest: how primitive Athens (now to be iden­tified with Socrates' ideal state) had defeated the invaders fromAtlantis. In the very hour when freedom and civilisation weresaved for the mediterranean world, the victorious Athenians hadthemselves been overwhelmed by flood and earthquake. Atlantisalso sank beneath the sea and vanished. What was to follow?The story was not to end with the cataclysm of the Critias; andthe Egyptian priest, discoursing at some length to Solon on theseperiodic catastrophes in which all but a small remnant of mankindperishes, has explained how the seeds of a new civilisation are

1 Cf. Fraccaroli, p. 13.6

INTRODUCTION

preserved either on the mountains or in the river valleys, accordingas the destruction is by flood or fire. When it is by flood, as atthe end of Critias' story, the cities on the plains are overwhelmed;only the mountain shepherds survive, and all culture is lost. Takingup the story at this point, what could Hermocrates do, if notdescribe the re-emergence of culture in the Greece of prehistoricand historic times? If so, the projected contents of the unwrittendialogue are to be found in the third and subsequent books of theLaws. There, after some preliminary ramblings about music andwine in Books i and ii, the Athenian settles down to business atthe opening of Book iii with the question: What is the origin ofsociety and government? In the immensity of past time myriadsof states have arisen and perished, reproducing again and againthe same types of constitution. How do they arise? Mankindhas often been almost destroyed by flood, plagues, and many othercauses; only a small remnant is left. Imagine one such destruc­tion-the Deluge. The herdsmen on the mountain-tops alonesurvived, while the cities on the plains or near the sea were over­whelmed. All arts and inventions perished; all statecraft wasforgotten. Here is exactly the situation with which the Critiaswas to end, described in language very like that of the Egyptianpriest. The Laws continues the story. After the deluge came avery long and slow advance towards the present state of things.Before the metals were rediscovered there was an idyllic phase ofsociety, resembling descriptions of the Golden Age, under the ruleof patriarchal custom. Next came the beginnings of agricultureand the formation of more permanent settlements. The coalescenceof various tribes led to the growth of aristocracies, or perhapsmonarchies, with kings and magistrates. A third stage saw theblending of different types of constitution. Mankind, forgettingthe dangers of flood, ventured down from the hills. Cities likeHomer's Troy were built once more on the plains. (Here we reachwhat was for the Greeks the dawn of history.) Then followed theTrojan War; and the troubles consequent upon the warriors'homecoming led to the migrations. Finally we reach the settle­ment of Crete and Lacedaemon. The Athenian recommends astudy of this succession of social forms, to discover what lawspreserve a city or tend to ruin it. The history of the Dorian statessuggests that government should be a mixture of monarchy anddemocracy. It is then proposed to apply this principle by framinglaws for a new colony. Book iv opens with the choice of a site,and the rest of the treatise outlines the institutions.

Since all this fits on exactly to the end planned for the Critias,it may well have been Plato's original purpose to use in the Her-

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INTRODUCTION

mocrates the material he had been collecting from a study of thelaws of Greek states. The whole trilogy would then have coveredthe story of the world from creation, through prehistoric legendand all historic time, to a fresh project for future reform. ButPlato was getting old. The composition of the Critias seems tohave been interrupted; it stops in an unfinished sentence. Afterthe interruption Plato might well feel that he could not completeall this elaborate romance about the invasion from Atlantis beforestarting upon the subject nearest his heart, which now fills tenbooks of the Lasas) There was, in fact, by this time far too muchmaterial for a continuation of the Timaeus trilogy, even with theassistance of the unnamed absentee. So he abandoned the Critias,and wrote the Laws in place of the Hermocrates,»

1 In the same way (si paroa lieet) Mr. H. G. Wells has, with advancingyears, grown impatient of the Utopian romance and taken to expressing hishopes and fears for the future through ever thinner disguises, ending withautobiography.

2 For the conjecture here elaborated see Raeder, 379.

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THE TIMAEUS

17A-27B. INTRODUCTqRY CONVERSATION

AN account of the persons who take part in the conversationprefacing the discourse of Timaeus has already been given in theIntroduction (pp. 1-3). We may proceed at once to the text.

SOCRATES. TIMAEUS. HERMOCRATES. CRITIAS

17A. SOCRATES. One, two, three-but where, my dear Timaeus,is the fourth of those guests of yesterday who were toentertain me to-day?TIMAEUS. He suddenly felt unwell, Socrates; he would nothave failed to join our company if he could have helped it.SOCR. Then it will fall to you and your companions tosupply the part of our absent friend as well as your own.

B. TIM. By all means; we will not fail to do the best wecan. Yesterday you entertained us with the hospitality dueto strangers, and it would not be fair if the rest of us werebackward in offering you a feast in return.SOCR. Well, then, do you remember the task I set you­all the matters you were to discourse upon?TIM. We can remember some; and you are here to remindus of any that we may have forgotten. Or rather, if it isnot too much trouble, will you recapitulate them brieflyfrom the beginning, to fix them more firmly in our minds?

c. SOCR. I will. Yesterday the chief subject of my own dis­course was what, as it seemed to me, would be the bestform of society and the sort of men who would compose it.TIM. Yes, Socrates, and we all found the society youdescribed very much to our mind.SOCR. We began, did we not? by separating off the farmersand all the other craftsmen from the class that was to fightin defence of the city?TIM. Yes.

D. SOCR. And when we assigned only one occupation to eachman, one craft for which he was naturally fitted, these, wesaid, who were to fight on behalf of all, must be nothing else

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